Reznet

Hope Rises From the Horror Stories

By Kevin Abourezk

It's a story we know well.

We've heard it a thousand painful times.

And it never gets any easier to hear.

But this week, as a North Dakota senator told that familiar story on the U.S. Senate floor, I began to experience an unfamiliar sense of hope.

That hope came as Byron Dorgan focused a national spotlight on the ugly truth about Native health care during debate on the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.

That hope came as Dorgan—his voice fueled by righteous indignation—related the story of Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight, a 5-year-old Crow girl from Montana who died in her mother's arms the night before she was to see Cinderella's Castle at Disney World because her cancer was not diagnosed early.

That hope came as he berated this country's leaders for allowing the death of Avis Littlewind, a 14-year-old girl who lay for 90 days curled up in a fetal position on her bed before killing herself because no treatment center existed on her reservation to help her.

That hope came as Dorgan and his fellow co-sponsors of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act put a human face on a problem ubiquitous to Native people—the problem of Indian health care.

Like the hope that comes the first time a long-buried secret is told—the hope that the only course left is out of the darkness—I can't help but feel that maybe true change is on the way for Indian health care.

The last time I felt this way was more than a decade ago when a banker from Montana blew the whistle on the government's mismanagement of billions of dollars worth of Indian trust accounts.

As a young Lakota boy in South Dakota, I had often heard stories of lost land records and royalties. I never thought some day someone might actually challenge the federal government to account for its incompetence in handling Native people's lands.

And after a lifetime of listening to horror stories of Indian health care, I never thought the day would come when a U.S. senator would challenge his own government to live up to another broken promise.

But that's just what Sen. Dorgan did this week.

He told his fellow senators to live up to their government's trust responsibility to this country's first people. He reminded them that the treaties their forefathers signed to gain vast tracts of land were more than just pieces of paper.

"This legislation on the floor of the Senate is not just some other bill," he said Tuesday. "This is a step toward completion of promises that have been made."

He appealed to their sense of decency:

How could this country fail to honor the contributions of a people who have sent their young men and women to battle in greater numbers per capita than any other ethnic group?

How could it ignore statistics like the 128 percent increase in the diabetes rate of Native youth ages 15 to 19 between 1990 and 2004?

How could it continue to spend twice as much on health care for a prisoner as it does for a Native person?

In the end, he reminded them of their responsibility to the memory of a 5-year-old girl who died after reservation doctors failed to detect the cancer that eventually stole her life.

"Let's meet our responsibility, keep our promises and provide decent health care to the people who were here first, and that's what this bill does. This bill is a step, just a step in the right direction."

It might be naïve of me, but I can't help but hope this one senator's plea for reform will light a fire.

Then maybe, just maybe, this story so familiar to me will someday be foreign to my children.

Kevin Abourezk, Oglala Lakota, is a reporter and editor at the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star. He is a reznet assignment editor and teaches reporting at the Freedom Forum's American Indian Journalism Institute.

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